My admiration and respect for both Heinlein and Asimov is high enough that I've quoted them multiple times on my quotes page:
- "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
-- Robert Heinlein
- "Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."
-- Robert Heinlein
- "Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare -- most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome."
-- Robert Heinlein
- "...Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives."
-- Robert A. Heinlein, -If This Goes On
- "What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'," said Jubal Harshaw in "Stranger in a Strange Land"
-- Robert Heinlein
- "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
-- Isaac Asimov
- "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov, column in Newsweek (21 January 1980)
I still reread much of my collection of Golden Age SciFi like Foundation or Stranger or EE smith and the Lensman series now & then to remind me that better and more mellow times and people are possible.
I don't know enough about Canadian politics to be certain on what a separatist is. Canada does weird me out on the whole thing about how hot the French vs. English language battle can get, even seemlingly more so than Spanish vs. English in the US. |
